Coheed and Cambria Start Their Next Saga With ‘Dark Sentencer’

Coheed and Cambria took a break from their love of creating elaborate stories with big mythologies surrounding their music with 2015's The Color Before the Sun, but it appears as though their fondness for concept albums is back with a rather elaborate new track called "The Dark Sentencer" which is a preview of what's to come for their next album.

Opening with a delicately forlorn piano intro, the track turns more electronic, as bleeps and blasts lead into a narration setting the tone for the new story. The music builds in intensity before eventually the guitars, drums and a shouting backing lead into the crux of the new song.

The player is an audio player, but does come with a backdrop starting in space but slowly revealing a spaceship of sorts that appears to be fleeing a much larger and ominous presence. The band also offered a bit of backstory in the description on the song player that reads as follows:

Years ago, chaos cut through this atmosphere. The fractured worlds that inhabit this space were once locked in a force of uncontrollable destruction. Gravity was lost. Their planetary trajectories conjoined in one catastrophic collision, choking to remain viable even as the dying glow of their cores peek through the cracks and scars of those impactful moments. Yet a gasp is a sign of life and the planets that many might have cast off as annihilated space continued to show a pulse across the hopelessness. This discarded earth is still very much alive…and made profitable by the 5 Houses of the Star Supremacy, an elite society who looked to the sky and saw potential in the wasted planets. The opportunistic approach could hardly be considered an act of empathy for the human condition, as the decision to convert the dying planets into private prisons meant another type of life sentence awaited those shipped off to their remote reaches. Here, the desolate and derelict would burn away slowly, trapped in a race to death with the very ground they stand on. In this space, between the Well and unknowing.

Our Story Starts there. Into our future, yet far beyond our past. In a romance between a pair of Unheavenly Creatures.

Weaving through the blacked out space toward the freckling of cracked planets, The Gavel moved like a funeral procession. In many ways, it was the end of life for the two prisoners being transported within its unmitigable walls, to the most deplorable and prized of the doomed prisons, known simply as The Dark Sentencer.

So now that the story is set and new music is out there, it's only a matter of time before Coheed and Cambria give listeners their next adventure. An album title and release date are still pending so stay tuned.

Coheed and Cambria will play the Bunbury Festival in Cincinnati on June 3, then start their summer touring with Taking Back Sunday in earnest beginning July 6 in Miami. See all of their scheduled dates here.